The present invention relates to novel medicaments comprising polypeptide amide derivatives, which can be used as therapeutic agents and more specifically as antagonists of the action of gastrin and related polypeptides relative to their specific biological receptors.
Gastrin is a natural hormone, which is in particular known for being responsible for the secretion of gastric juice. The way in which it acts on the organs of the digestive apparatus is, like that of most hormones, linked with the presence in said organs of target cells, whose plasma membranes have specific biological receptors able to fix the hormone molecules and produce under the action of the latter a cascade of biochemical reactions which lead to the synthesis and production of a particular product, such as gastric acid.
The term related polypeptides covers a family of polypeptides having at their end the sequence of four C terminal amino acids, L-tryptophanyl-L-methionyl-L-aspartyl-L-phenylalanine amide, characteristic of the biological activity of gastrin, whereby said polypeptides are able to produce biochemical reactions by fixing themselves to specific receptors.
It is known that a hormonal hypersecretion can cause certain known pathological disorders, for example for gastrin during the Zollinger-Ellison syndrome and suspected in numerous other ailments.
The difficulty occurring with the treatment of such pathological disorders is due to the fact that at present there is no product which is able to eliminate the action of these hormones relative to the target organs.